Pavilions Shopping Centre Birmingham

Overview

Pavilions, a shopping centre based in the heart of Birmingham's town centre contains more than 40 retailers, bringing the brightest and best in fashion, furnishings and home ware and with a fabulous food loft.

As with any shopping scheme, the venue has a constantly updating profile, with seasonal variations on 'offers' and a constant turnover of events and promotions.

Key Problems

Pavilions existing website was difficult to update and lacked the sophistication needed to fully communicate the constant changing face of a modern shopping centre. Pavilions also had a wish to interact more with their website users. They wanted to be able to collect the users email addresses in order to communicate more effectively with them, via regular e-newsletters of upcoming and existing events, promotions and offers.

To encourage this level of interaction they also wanted to utilise competition entry to facilitate the collection of marketing data from their customers.

Solution

Engaging, Multi-faceted Auto Updating Front Page

Duo designed and deployed a fully editable content managed website which created sections to help promote all the activities at the Pavilions Shopping Centre.

We integrated an easy to update events calendar which informed visitors of what was going on, on any specific date. We also made it possible to pull through key features of the shopping centre through to the front page, including the latest offers, competitions, events and news items. Combined with a large, fully editable slide show on the front page the site was easy to maintain and re-focus on features specific to the time of year.

Interactive Floor Plan

In addition to the new information on the home page we put together an interactive flash floor plan. Spread over four floors, Pavilions has quite a complex layout of shops. With this interactive plan it is easy for users to locate any of the stores within Pavilions prior to their visit to the shopping centre.

Competiton System

Having a constant stream of 'give-a-ways' on the website has proven a valuable way of collecting marketing data about visitors of the Pavilions Shopping Centre and website. The system we developed allows people to enter competitions on the site, and then groups them into a user database to allow Pavilions staff to pick a winner.

While collecting this data it also allows entrants to sign up for the e-newsletter so they can be informed about future competitions and promotions.

Since the sites launch the newsletter subscription list has grown from nothing to around 1,000 subscribers with an average of around 40 or so new subscribers each month. Because all the e-newsletter subscribers have been collected organically, instead of buying in marketing lists, Pavilions enjoys a high rate of confirmed readers.

E-Newsletter

Professionally designed and programmed on a quarterly basis, the e-newsletter is sent out to a growing list of organically collected subscribers via the website. It contains a long list of events and special offers available through Pavilions shopping centre.

As with all Duo Newsletters the Pavilions newsletter has been tested to display well in Outlook, Mac Mail, Yahoo and Hotmail and other commonly used email clients. It also comes with a suite of statistics tools which the staff at Pavilions can view and analyse to see how popular the newsletter is.

Result

Since Duo helped launched the site in 2009 the popularity of the site has increased month on month. The number of unique visitors has more than doubled in the last 12 months making the website an excellent marketing platform to talk about and promote all the activities of the Pavilions shopping centre.

Sending the newsletter typically results in a spike of around 10-20% increase in traffic for a couple of days after the newsletter is sent, bringing more people to the website and keeping them engaged in what Pavilions has to offer.